The HR function is going through a lot, and top HR consultant Josh Bersin is well aware.
The founder and CEO of a consulting company bearing his name, Bersin has become a fixture in the HR world over the past few years, and a top voice in human resources strategy discussions. He founded his first HR consultancy in 2004, which was eventually acquired by Deloitte where he served as a partner before branching out and founding his current consulting firm in 2018.
His annual closed-door HR conference, called Irresistible, kicks off today, where top CHROs from across the world gather to discuss the topics du jour for HR teams. This year, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission member Keith Sonderling will be attending, along with Tapaswee Chandele, Coca-Cola’s global vice president of talent and development, IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux, and Delta chief people officer Joanne Smith.
Fortune connected with Bersin before the big day to get an idea of what his keynote speech would be about, and the themes he’s hitting should be no surprise to regular CHRO Daily newsletter readers. The labor market, talent acquisition, and AI are all top of mind for Bersin right now. But rather than dole out advice for CHROs based on each challenge they’re facing, Bersin says they need to think bigger about how to meet the current moment.
“They have to think about their jobs differently,” he told me. “And to some degree, that means not only as an HR function, but also as the whole people operation in the company.”
Here are some of the main takeaways from Bersin’s conversation with Fortune.
The ball is still in the workers’ court
The “Great Resignation” might be over, but companies still face a stubbornly tight labor market. Falling birth rates, retiring baby boomers, and young workers' strong expectations that their employer prioritizes their well-being mean organizations still have to rethink how they attract and retain their workforce.
“Younger people are basically saying, ‘If I don't want to work 60 hours a week, I'm not coming there,’” he says. “And if you won't give me flexibility [or] a sense of autonomy, if you're not gonna let me use the tools that I use to do my job my own way, I may not be there. I may not show up.”
That means that companies may have to move beyond simply focusing on worker engagement. Instead, Bersin advises CHROs to focus on “employee activation,” or redesigning work around employee’s needs instead of expecting them to conform to the organization. And he adds that a shorter work week, though still a pie-in-the-sky idea for many organizations, is still very much in play.
“I don't think a four-day week is such a bad idea,” he says. “I think we're going to end up with a four day week."
There are too many HR roles in the mix
Companies have faced an ongoing parade of crises in recent years, from the COVID pandemic to social upheaval and RTO wars.
To address this, HR leaders recruited specialists who could fix each problem. A recent analysis from the Josh Bersin Company and LinkedIn found there’s been a 30% increase in the number of different HR job titles in the last three years.
But the problem now is that the HR function is filled with fragmented groups that don’t know how to work together. “There's been this proliferation of new groups every time there's a problem in HR, and we end up with all these little silos,” Bersin says.
The best specialists have a “T-shaped career,” says Bersin, where they have deep expertise in one area but also develop experience in other subjects, enabling them to be more collaborative. And the fracturing of the HR role into many different specialties may also be part of its evolution into a more high-profile part of the corporate C-suite.
“In some ways, it's the professionalization of a domain that started as a back office personnel function, now becoming a very strategic consulting function,” he says.
The promise of new HR tech
New AI HR solutions are poised to disrupt business as usual in a big way, according to Bersin.
He says HR leaders are frustrated with their current tech capabilities, and adds he doesn’t think there’s a one-stop-shop for everything that an HR department might need. As a result, he says many HR teams are buying new software every time they have a new issue to address. That has made the promise of AI particularly enticing for CHROs.
"They’re really thinking about redesigning a lot of these systems. They're not going to do away with Workday and SAP and Oracle for a long time,” he says. But he adds there will be a “trillion dollars of effort, getting rid of a lot of that clunky stuff that's been around for 25 years, and replacing it with an AI front end.”
When reached for comment by Fortune, SAP outlined their AI products for HR and wrote: “SAP has a deep legacy of providing truly global cloud HR – we are continuing to build on that by delivering new AI innovations and a completely redesigned user experience, which we will showcase at SAP Sapphire in two weeks.”
Oracle and WorkDay did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
But HR leaders still have a long way to go with AI themselves
Despite becoming the stewards for leading an organization’s workforce through the AI revolution, few HR leaders are ready to adopt the technology, according to Bersin.
It’s not because they’re afraid of AI, though. Instead, he says many have realized that they need to first clean up their company’s data set before it can be put to use. And they also want to get a deeper understanding of these tools and how they work before going all in.
Recently, Bersin hosted an AI fundamentals course for 50 HR professionals, and said he was surprised by how engaged and curious the attendees were.
“I thought they were going to be bored. But actually, they wanted to know: What is an LLM? What is drift? What is a hallucination? Why does this happen?” He says. “They just want to know how this stuff works, because it's becoming so essential to their jobs.”
